Is there a huge gap in lore? I lack perspective.

So I am trying to get my friend into WOW. So far the plan is going great. Step one, he is no longer Xbox dependent and admits PC's have merits. Step two, get him into the old Warcraft games. The part is working great, too great. He is enjoying the story and wants to see where it goes. Now I am kind of worried the lore is what he likes most and there is a chunk missing.

I played all the Warcraft games and then joined wow in Beta. I remember the game being accessible to me because things were familiar. So I worry if the game is less of a continuous story because of Cata. Are the missing years of story line going to change his leveling experience? He can go fight the Lich King and that is a plus but the early quests are going to talk about a lot of events he was never a part of. Do the assume he knows things? Do you think missing the years in-between the RTS and cata years will be lore confusing or OK? Is there a primer I should give him?

There is no way to understand WoW lore without massively reading up outside of the game, and it was like that even before Azeroth was changed in the Cataclysm. The game simply does a terrible job of explaining what is going on. If your friend wants to catch up on all that has happened so far he needs to start reading the books and online material, or you will need to explain it to him. There is no way he will understand anything by just playing the game.

So I am trying to get my friend into WOW. So far the plan is going great. Step one, he is no longer Xbox dependent and admits PC's have merits. Step two, get him into the old Warcraft games. The part is working great, too great. He is enjoying the story and wants to see where it goes. Now I am kind of worried the lore is what he likes most and there is a chunk missing.

I played all the Warcraft games and then joined wow in Beta. I remember the game being accessible to me because things were familiar. So I worry if the game is less of a continuous story because of Cata. Are the missing years of story line going to change his leveling experience? He can go fight the Lich King and that is a plus but the early quests are going to talk about a lot of events he was never a part of. Do the assume he knows things? Do you think missing the years in-between the RTS and cata years will be lore confusing or OK? Is there a primer I should give him?

I don't think it'd really "hurt" his experience, but a quick catch-up might be good, since you say he hasn't played since the RTS days. I suppose all you'd need to know is that "Illidan is dead, and the Burning Legion has been stopped for the time being. Arthas has been defeated, and Deathwing has returned to wreck havoc on the land in the wake of prior events. With Deathwings awakening, Thrall left the leadership of the Horde to Garrosh, so he could go to work towards stopping the threat Deathwing unleashed on the land."

I think that's be a pretty good catch-up. If he really gives a shit about the further details, or knowing what he missed, he'll go look it up. Direct him to http://www.wowpedia.com/ for more info. They're pretty good with the details of the lore there.

As long as he understands what the Cataclysm did (wowpedia / Youtube etc to show pre Cata world) there should be no issue, I don't recall vanilla leveling quests being strongly linked to any lore whilst getting to level 60 in-fact the new quests are probably better at being linked to lore.

Yea, i think this is an issue Blizz seemed to overlook, and one I hadn't even thought of until now considering I knew all the pre cata lore. But to a new player, such as your friend, I can easily see where he would be confused as to what happened. As the poster above me said, the only thing he can really do to catch up is do a little research on wowpedia.org as he goes through each 1-60 zone while leveling and figure out how the zone has gotten to the point it's at.

I think Bliz should have lengthened all the intro's to the races to give a brief history of the warcraft world between wc3 and Cataclysm. Maybe push it from the short 20 second intro it is now, to a minute or two. It's great that they redid all the old zones and updated things which needed it badly, but in doing so they created the problem OP is describing. A "Wtf just happened" kind of moment when first logging in.

Outside reading material or you explaining it to him is a must. If he's as into lore as you say he is I would show him to the books. He would probably enjoying reading them a lot. That or wowpedia and wowwiki if he doesn't want to read the books.